So, you’ve finally decided that you or your business have to be on the Internet? Here are a few basic things you might need to know before ordering a site from someone or doing it yourself.

Note: It’s important to mention that many of these definitions would probably differ a lot from the official ones but after all the point of this article is to be helpful to the complete beginners amongst you.

Terminology:

Client-Server Depending on the context there are many different definitions for clients and servers but in this case all you need to know is that the server is the place where your site’s files are stored, and the client is the software that receives the files on your PC, tablet or smartphone and transforms it into a format that is easily understood by humans. An example of a client is your web browser (Mozilla Firefox, Internet Explorer, Google Chrome, Apple Safari, Opera, etc).

http (Hyper Text Transfer Protocol) The mechanism used for transferring the web site’s content from the server to the client. It has another version called https which is used for transferring the content in encrypted form and it’s needed if you need to share confidential information like passwords or credit card numbers over the Internet.

Web Page A mixture of data (text, images, video, audio, etc.), formatted in a special way (html code) that is understandable by the web browsers and transformed by them in a way that is understandable by humans.

Web Site A group of web pages residing on the same domain and sharing a common topic. Try to imagine the site as a history notebook, and each web page is a lecture from that notebook.

HTML и CSS The language of the Internet. Many people think that HTML is a programming language but its purpose is just to describe the information the web page holds. Its earlier versions were used also for content styling (size and color of the text, different fonts, etc), but nowadays this role is handled entirely by CSS.

Domain In short this is the name through which your users are able to access your site. In order to get one, you need to purchase it from a hosting company or one that exclusively handles domains. Every domain can be rented for a predefined period of time (the minimum is usually a year), and must be renewed before it expires if you want to keep using it. An example for a domain is levelx.org

We must note that it is possible to have a site without owning a domain but it’s not very practical, especially if it’s a business web site.

Hosting The server(s) where your site is located. There are a few different types for which we are going to write a separate article.

There are many more things that can be added to this list and it’s not very thorough but we think that this is the minimal quantity of information you’ll need to know if you decide to order a website. If you didn’t understood something or don’t want to remember any of this – don’t worry – if needed it will be explained to you in every web design agency.